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detectiveangel · 1 year

Text

post-traumatic synthesized dreamscape no. 1

this digital sound composition is an attempt to transcribe (record, mollify, exorcise) my emotions looking back on the events of last february as i experienced them.

i was living in st. petersburg as a graduate student researcher, one of the dwindling ragtag lot of americans with no family ties to russia still trying to live there, when the russian military invaded ukraine early in the morning the day after february 23rd, the federal holiday honoring military men that was once red army day. i had already given up on my dream of living in russia for anything approaching the long term and was trying to stay for just as long as i safely could as History unfolded around me. i left russia 24 hours after the start of the invasion and made it back to the u.s. safe but mentally shattered. I’d spent months navigating or avoiding tense encounters with russian migration police as weekly updates to civil law gradually made it very nearly impossible to legally reside in russia as citizen of a designated “enemy nation;” and then finally found myself alone in a windowless room with an fsb agent in the remote checkpoint by the finnish border that terrible morning. my battered psyche imploded before the questioning, which was, objectively, very mild, even began.

back in the u.s., i spent months struggling to operate my own person before i realized that i had ptsd from a war to which i had barely been a distant bystander. i started therapy and saw massive improvement after just a few months. good fortune, which saw me safely through so many close calls and near-disasters during the grinding buildup and violent lurch into fully-fledged military rule in russia, blessed me yet again.

before entering formal therapy, i leaned very heavily on intoxicating substances (alcohol in russia, marijuana in the u.s.) and movies to keep the terror at bay. my understanding of myself in this phase of my life is heavily mediated by cinema, especially cinema made or set in the wwii and early “post-war” era. this time when society’s psychic wounds were only just scabbing over and could be seen on nearly everyone who crossed a camera feels less like the past and more like a parallel present still playing out in ever-more garbled reproductions in the nightmare fantasies that govern life in the places that never healed properly from the traumas of the ‘40s. to make beautiful or joyful art has become impossible, but the need to externalize our disordered response to trauma in art is stronger than ever. our voices can no longer carry a tune, but we have all history’s old recordings to grind and reshape into new kinds of music that may somehow express the emotions no amount of time and treatment can resolve.

some notes on the recordings i used as material for this piece

during this last year of trauma recovery, i saw myself most vividly in one particular cinematic incantation of postwar psychosis co-created by a brit and an american both too young to have experienced wwii but raised in its fallout as men in societies where the publicly synthesized idea of maleness is overwhelmingly suffused with the radioactive particles still emitting from the atoms of that war. watching mickey rourke’s performance in alan parker’s metaphysically-canted neo-noir “angel heart” (1987) somehow made a narrative out of the glossolalia of confusion and pain humming at the core of my being during the strung-out spring that followed the terrible winter of ’21-’22.

in the autumn before that winter, i had found strength and solace from the encroaching fascist terror in russia in the exploration and nurturing of my own masculinity. i had long identified more with a masculine perspective than a female one, but various factors limited the extent to which i expressed this identification. various other factors led to me reaching new levels of masculine identification and expression that fall, and this was a positive, self-actualizing experience that nurtured me during the months in which i lived under increasingly dire threat of repression from a government officially opposed to the existence of queers, americans, and gender studies researchers within its borders.

months of trudging alone through seedy hotels, anxious crowds, and icy boulevards, all while looking over my shoulder for police, were bearable if i saw myself as a sort of postmodern pastiche of film noir protagonists, a hardboiled detective working an increasingly dangerous case, an existentially bedraggled man in the wrong time, space, and body muttering clever wisecracks for the benefit of none but himself and perhaps some imaginary audience of ghosts and angels. at that time i hadn’t, to my knowledge, actually watched any of the classic bogart & co. detective movies, so my metaphysical drag act was itself composed from impressions and parodies. i was, however, quite intimate with other strains of 1940s cinema (i was in the archives mainly to study a film from that decade) and though my active memory has retained nothing of “casablanca” (1942), i did see that film at a Formative Age and this would seem the most likely source of my improbable and ultimately impossible lifelong obsession with becoming a jaded-yet-romantic american expat on the fringes of europe.

lying prone in the rubble of my exploded expat fantasies back in my native california, i watched movies projected on my ceiling and in most cases enjoyed a vacation from my psychological perspective through the temporary occupation of another. but once in a while, i caught my own reflection in the kino-eye. such was the case with “angel heart,” a meticulously formalist meditation on the fractured collective psyche of “postwar” america via the methodical deconstruction of a man composed entirely of echoes and fictions masking unbearable trauma from participating in ritual human sacrifice both literally (as an occultist) and metaphorically (as a soldier in the war). as a supernatural creation bearing the souls of both perpetrator and victim of the sacrifice, his trauma response is self-annihilating – a mystical representation of the psychosis experienced by all us cogs in the war machine, one-souled or otherwise. the two souls bound up in harry angel/johnny favorite both experienced the war from a sidelined, un-masculine position: one as a section 8 discharge dismissed after a brief, traumatizing stint of service, the other as an enlisted entertainer. this allegory resonated in the contours of my imagination with incredible sonority, but i saw my reflection well before the plot unfolded, in the very first scenes of the film, in the physical demeanor affected by mickey rourke loping awkwardly through dirty manhattan snow in a wool trenchcoat. i had caught a similar reflection many times in the windows of moscow and petersburg as i trudged through dirty snow, insulating my frightened self from a hostile world with a similar wool trenchcoat and self-effacing butch affect cribbed from cinema-mediated memories of ‘20s-‘30s tough guys.

my identification with this character/performance is only one undercurrent of this noise-music composition, but it is the one i feel needs the most explication. the meanings carried by the other voices (among them those of vyacheslav tikhonov portraying an exhausted soviet agent within the ss in early 1945 berlin, leonid utesov singing the praises of his beloved odessa, and alexander vertinsky crooning an emigrant’s lament for distant st. petersburg) are more self-apparent.

2/23/2023

media sampled here:

audio from the films

“the third man” (1949)

“семнадцать мгновения весны” (1972)

“angel heart” (1987)

“black angel” (1946)

“casablanca” (1942)

song recordings

“у черного моря” (leonid utesov, 1953)

“girl of my dreams” (etta james, 1960)

“чужие города” (alexander vertinsky, 1936)

“крейсер «аврора»” (choir of the leningrad pioneers’ hall, 1982)

additionally

personal audio recordings

midi file created from the composition “песня о далекой родине” (1972) by mikаеl tariverdiev

the accompanying video was created with samples from the above-mentioned films, as well as personal recordings and archival footage from a filmed concert performance by leonid utesov in 1940.

audio edited & produced using ableton live 9

video edited & produced in windows movie maker + microsoft clipchamp

some notes on the recordings i used as material for this piece

during this last year of trauma recovery, i saw myself most vividly in one particular cinematic incantation of postwar psychosis co-created by a brit and an american both too young to have experienced wwii but raised in its fallout as men in societies where the publicly synthesized idea of maleness is overwhelmingly suffused with the radioactive particles still emitting from the atoms of that war. watching mickey rourke’s performance in alan parker’s metaphysically-canted neo-noir “angel heart” (1987) somehow made a narrative out of the glossolalia of confusion and pain humming at the core of my being during the strung-out spring that followed the terrible winter of ’21-’22.

in the autumn before that winter, i had found strength and solace from the encroaching fascist terror in russia in the exploration and nurturing of my own masculinity. i had long identified more with a masculine perspective than a female one, but various factors limited the extent to which i expressed this identification. various other factors led to me reaching new levels of masculine identification and expression that fall, and this was a positive, self-actualizing experience that nurtured me during the months in which i lived under increasingly dire threat of repression from a government officially opposed to the existence of queers, americans, and gender studies researchers within its borders.

months of trudging alone through seedy hotels, anxious crowds, and icy boulevards, all while looking over my shoulder for police, were bearable if i saw myself as a sort of postmodern pastiche of film noir protagonists, a hardboiled detective working an increasingly dangerous case, an existentially bedraggled man in the wrong time, space, and body muttering clever wisecracks for the benefit of none but himself and perhaps some imaginary audience of ghosts and angels. at that time i hadn’t, to my knowledge, actually watched any of the classic bogart & co. detective movies, so my metaphysical drag act was itself composed from impressions and parodies. i was, however, quite intimate with other strains of 1940s cinema (i was in the archives mainly to study a film from that decade) and though my active memory has retained nothing of “casablanca” (1942), i did see that film at a Formative Age and this would seem the most likely source of my improbable and ultimately impossible lifelong obsession with becoming a jaded-yet-romantic american expat on the fringes of europe.

lying prone in the rubble of my exploded expat fantasies back in my native california, i watched movies projected on my ceiling and in most cases enjoyed a vacation from my psychological perspective through the temporary occupation of another. but once in a while, i caught my own reflection in the kino-eye. such was the case with “angel heart,” a meticulously formalist meditation on the fractured collective psyche of “postwar” america via the methodical deconstruction of a man composed entirely of echoes and fictions masking unbearable trauma from participating in ritual human sacrifice both literally (as an occultist) and metaphorically (as a soldier in the war). as a supernatural creation bearing the souls of both perpetrator and victim of the sacrifice, his trauma response is self-annihilating – a mystical representation of the psychosis experienced by all us cogs in the war machine, one-souled or otherwise. the two souls bound up in harry angel/johnny favorite both experienced the war from a sidelined, un-masculine position: one as a section 8 discharge dismissed after a brief, traumatizing stint of service, the other as an enlisted entertainer. this allegory resonated in the contours of my imagination with incredible sonority, but i saw my reflection well before the plot unfolded, in the very first scenes of the film, in the physical demeanor affected by mickey rourke loping awkwardly through dirty manhattan snow in a wool trenchcoat. i had caught a similar reflection many times in the windows of moscow and petersburg as i trudged through dirty snow, insulating my frightened self from a hostile world with a similar wool trenchcoat and self-effacing butch affect cribbed from cinema-mediated memories of ‘20s-‘30s tough guys.

my identification with this character/performance is only one undercurrent of this noise-music composition, but it is the one i feel needs the most explication. the meanings carried by the other voices (among them those of vyacheslav tikhonov portraying an exhausted soviet agent within the ss in early 1945 berlin, leonid utesov singing the praises of his beloved odessa, and alexander vertinsky crooning an emigrant’s lament for distant st. petersburg) are more self-apparent.

#music #personal #noise #sound art #soundscape #trauma #ptsd #war #movies #my life in movies #film #russia #ukraine #ussr #cinema #digital music #art experiment #noise art #sound collage #audio collage #россия #украина #война #кино #музыка #video art

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